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Sir Edward Evan (E. E.) Evans-Pritchard (21 September, 1902 – 11 September, 1973) was a Britishanthropologist instrumental in the development of social anthropology in that country. He was professor of social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1970.

This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism. As a result his trilogy of works on the Nuer (The Nuer, Nuer Religion, and Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology.

During WWII Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass the Italians and engaged in guerilla warfare. In 1942 he was posted to the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica in North Africa, and it was on the basis of his experience there that he produced The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. In documenting local resistance to Italian conquest, he became one of a few English-language authors to write about the tariqa. Near the end of the war, in 1944, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Later theories

Evans-Pritchard's later work was more theoretical, drawing upon his experiences as anthropologist to philosophize on the nature of anthropology and how it should best be practiced. In 1950 he famously disavowed the commonly-held view that anthropology was a natural science, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities, especially history. He argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation - finding a way to translate one's own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one's own culture.

In 1965, he published the highly influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, he claimed that anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they are studying. He also argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being quicker to come up with biological, sociological, or psychological theories to explain religion as an illusion, and believers being more likely to come up with theories explaining religion as a method of conceptualizing and relating to reality.

Family

Known to his friends and family as "E.P." Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma. His youngest son, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is an investigative reporter for the London Daily Telegraph
and author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton. His younger daughter, Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, PhD, is an expert on folklore and Middle Eastern studies. She is also a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. His eldest daughter, Shineen Evans-Pritchard, is a successful business woman. He also had twins - Nicky Evans-Pritchard, who works in computers, and John Evans-Pritchard, an economics teacher and author of several books.